


the wind wraps me like the reaper's hand

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deathfic, Everybody Dies, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which they all did one thing differently, and none of the endings are happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wind wraps me like the reaper's hand

A woman known as Sophie Deveraux dies in a fire in New York City. No one seems to know precisely who she is, no one claims the body, and her expenses are absorbed by the state.

An unrelated death is reported in a minor family in the British nobility, “after a long illness,” which is odd given that the woman in question was mid- to late-thirties and had seemed perfectly healthy at the last open garden event she’d attended.

A pretty, vivacious actress (who is terrible, but well-liked) disappears from her New England apartment. She is never seen again and no one ever finds out what happened to her.

—-

The worst thing Eliot Spencer ever did, he did for Damien Moreau. He did it, and he smiled in Moreau’s face afterwards. And then Moreau died slowly, painfully, and in more agony than all the people Eliot had killed, combined. Because Eliot Spencer is nobody’s bulldog, not anymore.

The second worst thing Eliot Spencer ever did, it turns out, was killing Damien Moreau. Not because he didn’t deserve it (oh, sweet lord did he deserve it, a million times over), but because Eliot had, in his rage, forgotten about power vacuums. When a leader is taken out, there’s an opening in his or her place, and an attendant rush to fill it. When the smoke clears, unfortunately, Eliot Spencer has killed several more people than he’d planned. And now he’s in charge.

The third worst thing Eliot Spencer ever did was try to dismantle the Moreau organization. In retrospect, this was more than obvious and he should have known better. The man might as well have been Moriarty, he had his fingers in so many pies and his hand up so many politicians’ asses and his blood money in so many peoples’ pockets. It took a year just to figure out which accounts were real and which were fake and which linked to old identities Moreay had built when he was first starting out, and which of those identities were wanted or dead or on watchlists or whatever. Not even to do anything about them, just to figure out the tangles.

And then it took two years to find the second group of identities and figure them out (newer ones, ones Moreau had ordered custom-built by people smarter than him, ones with next-level tech and dedicated servers keeping them hidden). Eliot Spencer stopped sleeping. He stopped eating food anyone else had touched at any point. He stopped drinking anything but water from a hip flask no one was allowed to look at, filled from a well he dug and secured himself behind his office in San Lorenzo.

It’s not an overreaction when you’ve done the things he’d done, and it’s not paranoia if they actually are coming to get you. Eliot Spencer takes out seventeen hit men in a month, and still won’t carry a gun. He stops leaving the house because the new encryption isn’t worth shit and his travel plans leak and he’s pretty sure every person he meets is a hired gun. 

An old friend is slaughtered in the house Eliot bought for him, left with a bloodied note that says, “Go ahead and blame yourself.” A former girlfriend is beaten to death and Eliot gets the video wrapped in holiday paper. Eliot’s nephew disappears, and he doesn’t know how that happened because no one ever knew about him, no one knew about his sister, nobody. When Eliot gets a copy of his hometown newspaper emailed to him, he understands: a kid he played football with, dead of heavy metal poisoning, very sudden. His home ec teacher, dead in a gas explosion in her house. The mechanic his sister used because he’d recommended them, disappeared driving to work. 

Eliot told Moreau once that being a high school quarterback was the best possible prep for the Army and what came after. Reading a situation fast, reacting to it faster, and changing plans even faster than that when things changed: football. He can do fast, he can do sudden changes in half-planned cons, he can do anything, really, as long as he has to hurry. But something like this, three years of drudging through books to learn enough to do the things he has to do so that he can spend another five years unhooking the vestiges of Moreau from governments all over the world?

It eats at him. And when the people who want him to stop turn to his family, it’s not a good thing, but it is, at least, a sudden thing. Eliot Spencer leaves his house for the first time in six months, and when he comes back, he has four new scars and another half dozen hits on his name. But his nephew is back and safe, his sister squirreled away with the few friends Eliot knows won’t be found. He’s done something good at last, something tangible. He feels relieved, reenergized, ready to save the world from the ghost of Damien Moreau.

Eliot Spencer never even hears the gunshot.

—-

The blond girl claims to be twenty-one, but if she’s a day over fifteen Archie will eat his hat. She’s good: light fingers, a fine touch, pretty but dressed in nondescript clothing. He caught her wrist almost without thinking when she’d lifted his wallet; it was the size, the skinny bones poking out, that caught his attention. “What’d you say your name was, sweetheart?” He pushes a mug of cocoa across to her. “This is a safe place,” indicates the diner they’re in, “no one’s gonna hurt you here.”

She slouches, sullen and stone-faced, in the seat across from him. Ragged blonde hair that hasn’t seen a wash in days hangs out of a worn green hoodie; her eyes are sunken and dull, her face thin and drawn. Hungry, tired, and cold: anyone with eyes would know that this girl was on the streets. But those reflexes, the near-automatic perfection of that lift! 

“Take a drink, I assure you I didn’t drug it.” He smiles, trying to be reassuring. No use: she doesn’t move.

“Okay, let’s try this. Hello, young lady. My name’s Archie. I’m a thief. What’s your name?”

She tilts her face up a little, just enough to look him in the eye. “Parker,” she whispers.

“That your last name or first name, Parker?” 

She stands, frowns. “Goodbye, Archie.” Walks away. Archie never meets the blonde girl again.

Six weeks later, Parker is nabbed in an air vent in a modern art museum. The years she then spends in prison could have been avoided, but the guard she killed had been a police officer. Prison hardens Parker, makes her more odd than she’d already been. She becomes proficient with weaponry, good at hand-to-hand, and stops believing in Santa Claus.

The next time Archie sees the blonde girl, she’s actually twenty-one, for real. She’s also gaunt and angry-looking on his TV screen, wanted for armed robbery. Any subtlety got beaten out of her in prison, along with the dull-eyed hunger. Now she looks cold, distant, and deadly serious. She looks like someone who never smiles, who uses guns like extensions of her arms, who robs banks with weapons instead of with cunning. As Archie’s daughter tries on her wedding dress, he wonders what the blonde girl could have become if she’d stayed, drank the cocoa, if he hadn’t scared her away.

“You all right, Daddy?” his daughter asks, noticing his forlorn expression.

“Yeah, yeah, honey, I’m fine.” He pastes a weak smile on his face, holds out one hand. “You look beautiful, my dear.”

When Archie gets put in a home a year later, he starts getting the newspaper delivered, because escaping too often draws more attention than he’d rather have at any given time. Six months in, the blonde gets busted. He follows the story more out of nostalgia and a misplaced sense of guilt than anything else. When she dies in prison (mysterious circumstances, possible gang involvement, a few guards under investigation), Archie feels like mourning. He doesn’t know why, and he can’t explain it.

—-

Nate Ford is not a good man. He’s always known this about himself even when he was pretending to be a good man, pretending to be a hero. He’s not, though. He’s Jimmy Ford’s son, and as much as he tries to be his mother’s son instead, he’s not. Not all the time, not enough to mean anything. He tries to help people, tries to do his job, tries to be a good husband and then a good father. And then his son dies, and Nate becomes his father’s son, wholly and irreversibly.

He also becomes, in chronological order: a drinker, a drunk, an alcoholic, one of his father’s enforcers (not with his fists, he’s too good a shot and too handy with a baseball bat for that), his father’s right hand. People tell stories about the Fords, about Jimmy and his poker game, about Nate and his plans. Nate, with cold eyes and whiskey on his breath, who stole millions from the Connellys and got away with it with Jimmy at his back, that revolver like a promise in his hand. The Ford men, small and not at all intimidating until they look at you, open their mouths, tear you to shreds in half a sentence. 

Nate’s wife left him after the boy died, and he tells her nothing. “None of her business,” he says, pouring himself another double, but what he means is, “I don’t want her to know.” Jimmy’s wife died still angry he was breaking the law, still loving him anyway. “She never understood me,” he says, taking a drag on the hand-rolled he brought with him, but he means, “She was a good person.” The Ford men aren’t great with talking about themselves. Other people, marks, you? They can talk all day and mean every bit of it. But turn those words back on them, and they shutter and saunter away. It’s just how things are.

Nate Ford spends a year, two years, three working for his dad. Enforcing, planning, lifting, conning: he can do it, fast and good and (some whisper when they think the old man can’t hear them, which is never a true state) maybe even better than Jimmy Ford ever did. The secret is that Jimmy Ford is a ruthless son of a bitch and Nate Ford is a calculating monster of a man, and together they’re bound to rule the world one day. Or, well, if not the whole world, at least their part of Boston. That’s theirs, a family heritage, and if Nate’s boy was still alive it’d be his someday if he wanted it.

Instead, they sit at a bar in a pub in a basement in a middling part of town, drinking everyone under the table and taking them for all they’re worth. Nate Ford kills his father after four years, kills him and never looks back, and the revolver feels warm and loving in his hand the way a glass of Scotch does, and after that he’s got one in each hand and a shit-eating grin on his face.

When the O’Briens finally get him (in the basement of a church, which isn’t holy ground, you know, somehow), he dies with them in his hands and a smile on his face. Nate Ford dies so drunk he doesn’t even know what happened until the last breath ghosts out of him.

—-

Alec Hardison is imprisoned at the age of twenty-one.

His foster mother, having died the year before of health problems Alec refused to explain, wasn’t ashamed of him. His foster siblings were just confused at the sudden loss of an extra few hundred dollars they’d grown accustomed to finding in their bank accounts every month or so. 

When someone from the State Department comes to visit, Alec is sullen and unengaged. He does not look the agent in the eye, respond verbally, or seem to process what is being told to him. When the agent produces a cell phone, Hardison reacts: he wakes up, it seems. Reaches out.

A few years later, Alec Hardison releases a supervirus that wipes out Iranian missile defense systems so completely that it takes them nine months to get the computers to turn back on. The virus spreads (its nickname, Kobayashi Maru, is indicative of both its seemingly unbeatable nature and the high nerd quotient of the average State Department agent) like wildfire. Governments with whom the United States had unresolved conflicts suddenly found themselves unable to check email, much less maintain order. Riots began.

And somewhere, Alec Hardison watches closed-circuit coverage and allows himself a small, chilling smile. The burly man standing guard calls him a cold son of a bitch. “I prefer to call it inspired,” he replies. The guard feels a shiver of fear. “I’m a twenty-four-year-old with a cell phone and a problem with authority. You should be very, very afraid.” They are. All of them.

That’s why the news hears that a troubled young man killed himself in prison a few months later. Because of that fear, and an air bubble introduced into an IV line keeping a battered young man alive after he accidentally bludgeoned himself into a coma on a bunch of telescoping batons. These things happen when people grow too powerful, too frightening to control. Order is everything. Chaos cannot reign.

**Author's Note:**

> [title from "Free Until They Cut Me Down" by Iron & Wine]


End file.
